Alternative Media and the Global

By focusing on alternative media throughout the world, this course poses a question about the contours of global that emerge when we center media projects invested in social change and global justice. The dominant understanding of globalization suggests that media, through satellite and digital technologies, played a pivotal role in intensifying interconnectedness between different parts of the planet in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. As the primary actors in this process, Western media corporations facilitated a one-directional movement of media and cultural content, “from the West to the rest.”  However, an analysis of various media initiatives, spanning countries such as the Philippines, South Africa, and Mexico, and encompassing print, radio, cinema, and television, reveals a longer history of media globalization. Moreover, such an analysis reveals that the directions of media travel complicate the binary divides between East and West, as well as the Global North and South. During the course, we will examine the specific historical and material conditions that give rise to different alternative media initiatives. We will explore how media makers’ aspirations and invocations of the world and universal have created specific configurations of the global.